On Global Warming, Follow the Money

There is a real irony in the Left’s repeated insinuation that climate realists must be funded, somehow, by the oil industry. In truth, there is plenty of money being distributed to climate scientists, but just about all of it comes from governments, and all government money goes to alarmists who promote government power. From this week’s The Week That Was, from the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

Based US government reports, SEPP calculated that from Fiscal Year (FY) 1993 to FY 2013 total US expenditures on climate change amount to more than $165 Billion. More than $35 Billion is identified as climate science. The White House reported that in FY 2013 the US spent $22.5 Billion on climate change. About $2 Billion went to US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The principal function of the USGCRP is to provide to Congress a National Climate Assessment (NCA). The latest report uses global climate models, which are not validated, therefor speculative, to speculate about regional influences from global warming.

Much of the remaining 89% of funding goes to goes to government agencies and industries claiming they are preventing global warming/climate change, even though they do not understand the natural causes of climate change and, likely, far overestimate the influence of CO2. These entities have a vested interest in promoting the fear of global warming/climate change.
It is time for the government to stop funding irrational fear of global warming/climate change based on a concept of climate that is not substantiated by the physical evidence. If we are to progress in our understanding of climate change, the paradigm must be changed from one that earth’s temperatures are largely controlled by atmospheric CO2, to one which recognizes that climate change is normal and predominately natural. Human CO2 emissions have little, if any, influence on temperatures and other climate trends.

One of the worst consequences of the global warming power grab by the U.S. government and others around the world has been the corruption of the scientific process, which has brought the discipline of climate science, and by association science in general, into disrepute.